Thanks to RP for sending along this link to a piece in The Chronicle for Higher Education on Rome’s ecclesiastical universities. Very fair, balanced and informative. Did you know that for a lay person, tuition is only 2500 bucks a year at one of these institutions?????

In addition to the core subjects of theology, philosophy, and canon law, Rome’s ecclesiastical universities offer instruction in a wide variety of humanities and social sciences. Some of the subjects, such as sacred music, are clearly related to the institutions’ religious mission. Other fields, such as sociology and development economics, have less obvious links. (By contrast with the teaching in the theology and philosophy faculties, many courses in the social sciences at the ecclesiastical universities might strike Americans as surprisingly progressive, in line with the Vatican’s policies on social justice and solidarity with the poor.)

The basic principle of the curriculum, Archbishop Miller says, is to train Catholics to serve the church in fields of study appropriate to the work of evangelization in the world. Thus, students in the communication school at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross typically plan to work as spokesmen or public-relations consultants for their home dioceses. As one of the first exercises in a course on audio-visual communication, the instructor, Jorge Milán, holds role-playing sessions in which he impersonates a hostile reporter raising recent church controversies such as scandals over pedophile priests.

But he does not neglect the basic skills that any secular school would teach. On a recent afternoon, several students, including an Iraqi nun, worked in the university’s television studio, going over video documentaries they had made on one of the historic bridges spanning Rome’s Tiber river.